


Heavenly Bodies

by confusedkayt



Series: Closer To God [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Charged domesticity, Cuddling and cannibalism, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oh Hannibal, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, SPOILER: the tagged death is Bedelia's, Slow Burn, Will and Hannibal do NOT die, negotiation, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-24 01:49:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4900906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confusedkayt/pseuds/confusedkayt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fall, Will and Hannibal try to carve out the boundaries of a new existence.  A world of two can't hold.  A safe house can't stay safe.  The two of them are still becoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Discussion of the injuries incurred in the finale, in some detail. The after-credits scene will feature prominently. Canon violence and cannibalism.

Yesterday is hazy. Will can recall every detail, every last one, but the images and feelings are melted at the edges, Dali’s clocks. He used to worry that his body remembers things he still can’t, that his brain conjures up a ghost fever in Hannibal’s presence. So many of his memories of Hannibal drip and blur at the edges if he looks at them too long.

It had been dreamlike, darkness and morphine and aftermath. Here, now, in the harsh light of the sun, it’s just… heavy. His limbs are heavy. His body is heavy, pressing wounded feet to cold tile. Hannibal’s restraint is heavier, pressing on Will like a tangible thing. It’s unfamiliar. Hannibal has been many things to Will and around him, but never _hesitant._ It’s not… comfortable.

Hannibal has busied himself at the sink, cleaning up the remains of a porridge that was better than it had any right to be, though it tore at Will’s ruin of a mouth. Will hovers in the doorway, watching. Hannibal knows it, but he’s silent. Stubborn man, up on his feet. Will would like to bring him a stool to rest on, but it wouldn't be welcome. Hell, it might not be _possible_ \- today, he can feel the pull of his shoulder and side when he takes a breath.

Nevertheless, he pulls his feet and they pull the rest of him into Hannibal’s gravitational field. “I’ll dry,” and he means to offer but his voice is all demand.

Hannibal’s lips press together, but he shifts his weight to make room. Will’s breath comes too hard when he stoops to grab at a white dishcloth hanging neatly on the cupboard beneath the sink. Hannibal’s eyes flick toward him and his mouth tilts down, just so, but still he’s silent.

Each motion has a high cost, but he’ll take his share. It can’t be any better for Hannibal. The first bowl. The second. Hannibal offers them in such a way that his hand won’t touch Will’s. The weight of his disapproval is crushing.

He’s sick of it. The silence is suddenly unendurable, and he overextends his arm to place his hand over Hannibal’s when Hannibal passes the first saucer. Hannibal doesn’t turn his head, but his eyes are on Will, sidelong. Still, he doesn’t speak.

Will swallows, hard, against the sudden dryness of his mouth. He’ll have to push the words out from underneath this weight. He shifts, even as it jostles his shoulder, but he won’t relinquish Hannibal’s hand and he has to look at him, for this, even if Hannibal remains forward-facing, immobile. “Our fall,” he says, and Hannibal tenses next to him. “I thought you would like it. It was…” Another swallow, this one to buy time while he chooses the word. “Operatic.”

Hannibal’s mouth curves up, just slightly. At least the corner Will can see does. The pause is long but it’s not hesitation. No, now it’s consideration.

He’s gifted with a slight turn of Hannibal’s head, the weight of his direct gaze. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, with humor, Will thinks. “In this, I find I prefer the conceits of comic opera,” and this new warmth is heavy, too, but pleasantly. “Mistaken identity, put right in the end.”

“Tired of writing tragedies?” Will asks, light, but Hannibal’s head jerks fractionally, very nearly startled. His fingers are tense beneath Will’s.

“Are you?” and it could be a dodge, but it isn’t.

“Not at all,” he says, quiet, gaze on Hannibal. Hannibal turns, eyes dark and flat and full all at once somehow, fixed on Will’s. He is not tempted to fidget.

The tension leaks out of Hannibal’s frame, or some of it does. He turns back to the dishes, and Will takes the saucer without complaint. He shifts, adjusts until his hip bumps up against Hannibal. 

“I fear that circumstances dictate that we compose a ritornello,” and Hannibal’s voice is even, calm. It relaxes something in Will, at least. “Jack will not be satisfied easily.”

“And so we wait,” Will says, places the dry saucer in the rack. “I don’t mind.”

Hannibal angles his head toward Will, not much, a fraction. The curl of his lip is warm. It feels like an answer.


	2. Chapter 2

This is something like normal. He hadn’t realized he’d missed the music until it was back, filling the corners of silence. Will doesn’t know the name of the piece pouring from the living room speakers, and that too is a relief. Hannibal is too fond of symbols, returning motifs. Something unfamiliar means that he is not stage-managing them back into familiar tableaus.

Hannibal settles himself on the couch, frowning down at a metal lock-box in his lap. Will winces at the hard edge too near Hannibal’s torn side. Be careful, he wants to say, but he knows better. “I don’t suppose you have a compression girdle,” he tries instead.

Hannibal blinks at him. “There is no scientific consensus behind them,” he offers, which isn’t a no.

Will half-smiles, just the good side of his face. He’s learning the trick of it, but even that pulls, a little. “Than how about anecdote? It helped me, after,” he says, and brushes his hand along the place where his shirt hides Hannibal’s signature on his belly.

Hannibal regards him for a moment, steady. Will gives in to the urge to clench his hands. He doesn’t want a fight, but he does want… Something. To help, to take action. Something.

“I keep a supply of elasticized bandaging,” Hannibal says, eventually, a strange catch in his voice. He sets his box on an end table. He means to rise, Will realizes.

“Let me,” Will says, and his voice is not quite right either. “I mean, I’m already up.”

Hannibal closes his eyes, too long to call a blink. “You will find it in the bathroom cabinet.”

Will nods, jerky, and turns too quickly. He can feel Hannibal’s gaze on his shoulder blades as he retreats.

He smears fingerprints on the bathroom mirror, but it is clumsy to pry the cabinet open with only his left hand. Sure enough, there’s a neat container of Ace bandages in the deep cabinet. On impulse, he grabs for a white plastic first aid kit as well, and nearly drops it. It’s hard to manage with one good arm. He settles for crooking his right arm at the elbow, light pressure enough to keep the Ace bandages in place. It doesn’t hurt, much.

He makes his way back to the living room. Hannibal is just where Will left him, straight-backed, hands on his knees. It hurts, for some reason, and Will swallows against it, ignore the way Hannibal’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he does.

“Can I,” he asks, nodding at the space next to Hannibal on the couch. Hannibal nods, eyes on Will’s hurt shoulder, a faint frown.

Will lowers himself onto the couch, close, thigh against thigh. Hannibal shifts against him, half twists. He’s reaching toward the Ace bandages but he hesitates, just for a moment. It’s enough to throttle Will with unreality. Hannibal seldom hesitates. Today - last night - he does.

Hannibal takes the Ace bandages from the crook of Will’s bad arm and the moment breaks, but the sense of unreality has settled into the room. It can only be defeated by practicalities. Will shakes the first aid kit. “I’d like to change your dressings.”

“You may,” and Hannibal’s voice is even but there’s a little snark around his mouth, the memory of polite command-requests in a kitchen long ago.

“Oh, may I,” Will says, puts a gentle hand on Hannibal’s lower back. “Scoot forward.”

Hannibal’s slow blink conveys his general disdain for the concept of scooting as applied to his person, but he obligingly shifts forward. Will pushes Hannibal’s soft sweater up, baring the gauze pad that hides his exit wound. The pad is damp. Of course - Hannibal must have showered. “That can’t be comfortable,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. I should have changed it sooner.” The slight jostling indicates that Hannibal shakes his head, but Will keeps his eyes on the bandage. Strange. No polite words are forthcoming.

He eases his fingers under some of the medical tape. It gives easily. Will knows from experience that it’s better to yank it off all at once, so he does, but gently. Still, the flesh pulls and there are many coarse hairs caught in the tape. He’s close enough to feel Hannibal’s indrawn breath. “I’m sorry,” and he is. His hand pets at the too-pink outline the bandage has left on Hannibal’s skin.

“There is no need to apologize.” Hannibal’s voice is thick. Will suppresses a bitter chuckle; it would hurt.

His hand shakes a little as he tears open a sterile wipe. He takes a breath, steadies so that his touch will be light against Hannibal’s stitches. The steps are too familiar. Caring for wounds took on the flavor of ritual long ago.

His fingers are steady as he smoothes antibiotic ointment on the wound, as he places the gauze, the tape. It’s a two-handed job, but his own pain hides in a distant corner of his mind. “There,” he says, tracing his fingers along Hannibal’s side, under his sweater. He stops when they graze gauze. This padding is not damp. Of course. Hannibal must have changed it himself; it is easier to reach. Still, Will pushes up Hannibal’s sweater to get a look at it. It’s dry, clean. He runs his fingers along the tape. It is secure.

Hannibal’s breaths are shaky under his fingers. “Does it hurt?” Will asks. Hannibal shakes his head. “Liar,” he says, voice fond. Hannibal catches his eye and smiles, and Will swallows hard at the soft cast of his face.

There is a pause, endless, and Will knows he will be the one to break it. He leans forward to take the Ace bandages that Hannibal has unboxed and placed in his lap. He settles the edge of the bandage flush over Hannibal’s gauze pad, and hooks the edge to the gauze with great care. A bit of medical tape for good measure. He fumbles for Hannibal’s hand, squeezes it gently before drawing it over to the edge of the bandage. “Hold that,” he says, too quiet to count as an order. Hannibal does.

“This won’t be graceful,” he warns, and Hannibal exhales through his nose, not quite a snort. Will leans forward to tug the bandage across Hannibal’s midsection. Too fast - he jostles his shoulder, and his hissed breath hangs loud between them.

“Allow me,” Hannibal murmurs, bringing his right hand down to hold the bandage edge and taking the slack up with his left. He draws the bandage across his own body. It doesn’t feel right.

“Here,” Will mutters, and leans back as far as he can. He angles his torso carefully, and he can just catch at Hannibal’s hand. He takes the bandage and draws it firm across Hannibal’s back. When he rounds the curve of the ribs, Hannibal is there to begin the circle again. It takes several clumsy passes; inconveniently- placed elbows, missed hand-offs, awkward moments when Hannibal's sweater slips down to impede their progress. There’s something horrible about it. Pedestrian. Prosaic. Hannibal must hate it. Finally, finally it’s done. Will puts a hand against the bandage edge to check the tension, lets his hand rest there. “It was supposed to help with the pain,” and the bitter laugh is there in his voice.

“Yes,” and Hannibal’s voice is _ragged._ Will doesn’t know what to do with that. He hates it, suddenly, that Hannibal is subject to all of the indignities that come with the possession of a body, hates that his sweater is askew, that it is not layered over a crisp button-down tucked into pants with surgical precision. He had wished to see Hannibal undone. The petty reality of it twists his gut.

The pressure of Hannibal’s regard snaps him out of it and Will suddenly feels ridiculous. Hannibal is unbothered, even content. Still, Will smoothes the front of his sweater into order. Hannibal’s eyes fall shut as he does. The thought of it bunched up at the back itches at Will’s mind and he leans back, gentles the material down. He leaves his arm where it lays, curled against Hannibal’s back. Hannibal is warm, and his sweater is soft.

Hannibal shifts against him, and Will abruptly becomes aware that he is leaning against Hannibal’s injured side. He’s bad at this, at not hurting Hannibal. Lack of practice. Still, he’s slow to retract his arm, to scoot far enough away that he can rise without jostling against Hannibal. He stands, and feels cold.

From above, it is easy to see that Hannibal’s eyes are too bright, too damp. Still, his voice is almost even when he says, “You should rest.”

Will doesn’t mean to look at space by Hannibal’s good side, but he does, and Hannibal catches the movement. He swallows, ashamed, but Hannibal moves to make more space, settles himself against the back of the couch. “If you would like,” Hannibal starts, and doesn’t look at him.

His feet are moving without his permission and he’s there in three neat steps. Hannibal is very still as Will braces his good arm on the seat, lowers himself down, thigh against thigh. He tips his head back to rest on the juncture of Hannibal’s shoulder and that makes it real. He tenses, and Hannibal moves his arm. He’s got to get up, and he will, but then Hannibal’s fingers brush his shoulder, just barely. He has stretched out his arm along the back of the couch, leaving a comfortable hollow for Will’s head and Will lacks the energy to pry himself out of it.

“I don’t know why,” Will says, and that’s not quite true but he has to say something, doesn’t he.

“Rest now,” says Hannibal, quiet, very still. Will settles his head into warm, tangible proof that they are both here, even if they are quiet with one another. He counts breaths and knows that Hannibal marks each one, too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A feel like I should leave a warning for lightly implied violence, which - SPOILER - we already saw after the credits.

He wakes, warm. It takes a minute to get his bearings, to identify the source of his comfort as Hannibal’s shoulder, Hannibal’s chest. The warmth inside him intensifies and he can’t think about that, not yet.

“Hello,” Hannibal murmurs. Will’s not ready to open his eyes, to break the spell of sleep.

He can think of nothing to say for several long breaths. If he burrows his face against Hannibal’s chest, just for a moment, well, he’s mostly asleep.

But there’s light outside his eyelids. The spell’s long past its expiration date. He opens his eyes, but he can’t bear to move his head. Not yet. “We can’t stay here.”

The underside of Hannibal’s jaw brushes along the top of his head. “No,” and his voice is heavy, almost sad.

He draws himself up, straightens his back. Hannibal blinks at him calmly. Will can’t help but smile. Damn stitches. “Got any bright ideas?”

Hannibal returns the smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “As a matter of fact, I have made some preparations.” A pause, and Hannibal slowly draws the arm that Will had been resting on back against his side. “I will have to go out this afternoon, to set them in motion.”

“Want company?” and Will immediately feels that it was the wrong thing to say.

“I would prefer to surprise you,” and Will feels almost panicky at this, the end of their too-brief time in this place, this mood.

The spell has already dissipated, but it’s well and truly gone when Hannibal smiles with shark eyes and says, “In addition, I have a few small errands, and a call to pay.”

He doesn’t say who he’ll be meeting. He doesn’t have to. “Will she be joining us?” and he sounds near as angry as he is.

Hannibal smirks, and isn’t that icing on the cake. “Yes and no. I would prefer to surprise you with the particulars.”

Will stares at his hands, tries to tamp down the nastiness that he knows is a mask for his sudden terror that this… softness, this accord, will vanish as soon as the door to the house opens. “Already?” he says, and hates the pleading note in his voice.

“Dear Will,” and there’s smugness, yes, but that’s not all, not even the half of it. “You must know…”

Hesitancy, again. Will can’t stand it. “I must know what?” and he cuts himself off before he can say more things that he’ll regret.

A long pause. “You said it yourself. We can’t stay here,” and the smugness is gone, replaced with something that’s almost regret.

He repays sincerity with sincerity. “I want to.”

Hannibal sighs, moves his arm so it brushes against Will’s. It’s deliberate, he can tell, but it settles him a little. “Soon, we will be in a position to do as we wish.”

We do nothing but wait, Will thinks, but he has no desire to give voice to it. “All right,” he says, instead.

Hannibal waits, clearly hoping that more words will be forthcoming. Finally, he sighs, and rises from the couch. “I would prefer to give you a dose of morphine, but we must allow for the possibility of unwelcome visitors while I am away.”

The pragmatism blunts Will’s ill-feeling, as it was meant to do. His physical pain is present, but not overwhelming, and sleep is still tugging at the edges of his mind. “I’ll be fine,” he offers.

Hannibal nods. “No time like the present,” he says, and heads for the door without another word. Will clenches his hands in his lap and fights the urge to call after him. The door clicks shut, hard and final.

Will forces himself to rise, to go through the motions of cleaning up the traces of their presence before the tail end of his morphine wears off and turns unpleasantness into agony.

He settles into the couch. It’s cold now, of course, but he can stretch down the length of it in Hannibal’s absence. It’s close enough to the door that he’ll hear it open. The window’s open, which ought to allow him to hear a car approach if his sleep is not deep. He’s tired, and the risk is small, or Hannibal would never have left him. He lets himself drift.

Later, much later, he is startled awake by the noise of the front door. Will rises, readies himself, but relaxes at the sound of a familiar, measured tread. He tries on a half-smile. “Miss me?” and it’s a joke but Hannibal freezes, almost a flinch.

“In truth, I have enjoyed the time to gather my thoughts.” Hannibal’s glance is almost apologetic. “Memories can lose some of their clarity if I do not timely fix them in their proper place.” Hannibal’s body leans toward Will in a way Will’s not sure that he’s aware of. “I could not bear to lose a single detail.”

Will gives in to the impulse to step closer, curl a hand around Hannibal’s good shoulder. “Me either,” and his voice is rough and too open but it’s too late now even if he cared to hide. Hannibal’s near-total stillness is proof that he has not overstepped. At length, he feels Hannibal’s breath on his cheek, feels the muscles under his hand bunching, just slightly.

He steps back, so aware of Hannibal’s liquid eyes before they are hidden away by a long blink. “I took some forensic countermeasures,” and the bald practicality shatters the heaviness hovering around them. “I can’t be sure I got everything.”

“Of course,” and Hannibal’s voice is even as his gaze. “Your prudence should be adequate to the occasion. There will be no reason to look.”

“No budget for lab costs when there’s not a body.”

Hannibal’s eyebrow quirks in mild rebuke. “Do not underestimate Uncle Jack’s capacity for tenacity.”

He should be more worried about it, but. “Don’t overestimate his pull at the bureau. This operation was a major disaster, and that’s before we vanished, you and I.” His smile is too wide, too grim. It pulls at his stitches. “People will want to believe that we’re gone.”

“Ah,” says Hannibal. A faint hint of embarrassment. “I have indulged myself.”

Will’s laugh’s a bitter bark. “I know. Discretion isn’t exactly your hallmark, but….”

Hannibal’s eyes are harder, now, almost guarded. _What are you asking of me,_ they say. 

Will chooses to answer. “I’m not asking you to change,” and Hannibal’s face shutters further. “To change more,” he amends, and there’s the faintest hint of relaxation. “Just… this once. Discretion.” He can’t look at Hannibal, not while he says this. “Give us time. Give us time to get away.” _Together,_ he wants to add, but can’t, not quite. It hangs between them anyway.

Hannibal clears his throat, and the tension leaks out of Will. A small slip in his control, but it’s _his_ control. They’re out of the woods. “It is just as well,” and Will is warmed by the transparently false casualness of Hannibal’s tone. “I don’t wish to make a spectacle of her. This is,” a pause, “private.”

“I see,” Will says, studies the floorboards in front of him. He hates the irritation bubbling up in him, the near-rage at the intrusion into their unsustainable world of two.

“Not from you,” and Hannibal’s smugness crackles across Will’s already-raw nerves. “Share and share alike.”

Will says nothing, swallowing as though he could was away the ugly feelings surging within him. At length, Hannibal steps nearer, hand hovering below Will’s elbow. “Come,” and Will tries to see it as a peace offering. “We should not linger here.”

He drops his elbow into Hannibal’s waiting hand in lieu of a reply. Hannibal’s palpable delight is an irritant. Will feels petulant, and tired. Small.

He allows himself to be lead from the house and into the wide wide world, snorts at the sight of an older-model Prius in the driveway. Hannibal grins at him, sly. “They are invisible in their ubiquity.”

“Discretion, after all,” Will says, and tries to dredge up a smile.

“It is not, as they say, my first rodeo,” and it’s blatant pandering but Will’s amused anyway. “I do regret that the backseat is cramped. It would be best if you rested.”

“I’ve been resting all day,” Will grumbles, even though he knows he’ll agree.

“Ah, but now it is you who must sacrifice in the name of discretion. Other drivers may notice your bandaged cheek.”

Will sighs, but he’s already decided to give in. “All right.”

A pause. “Will you take a percocet?” That’s unexpected. “The drive is long, and I will have a few preparations to finish when we arrive.” A pause, and then more sincerely, “I would have you truly present for our meal, but not in pain.”

Will allows that remarkable statement to soothe over the worst of his annoyance. It’s enough to blunt even the strangeness of Hannibal’s careful attention as he slides into the backseat, equipped with a soft throw and a large pillow. The case is silk. He can’t help but crack a smile at that.

Hannibal fusses around in the front seat and returns with a white pill and a bottle of Perrier. Will snorts but takes both and does his best to settle into the backseat, Hannibal’s attention too avid throughout the process. Finally, finally, Hannibal shuts the door and Will lets himself drift as the car starts, as a soft piano piece wafts through the speakers. He’s glad, suddenly, that he can’t see the house recede behind them. “I liked it there,” he says. Hannibal doesn’t reply, and Will slips into sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of the idyll! I hated to slash open their bubble, but the time had come. I hope you enjoy!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal and Will visit with Bedelia. I think you know what's coming, but PLEASE take a look at the chapter warnings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS (these are rather spoilery, and most of them are closely tied to what we saw onscreen, so feel free to skip if that is comfortable to you.)
> 
> ***
> 
> Character death. The character in question is Bedelia.
> 
> Cannibalism. The visceral practice of same is explored in some detail, in a canon-typical fashion, but I found it pretty disturbing to write.
> 
> I feel that I should warn about a change in the tenor of this story. The possibility of violence often simmers below the surface of interactions with Hannibal, and here, he's acting out more than usual. I have a lot of thoughts as to why, some of which are in the end note, but this chapter cannot fairly be described as peaceful (certainly not fluffy, even the grim kind). I felt it was only fair to warn for bleakness, just in case anybody who enjoyed the fragile closeness would rather not read this type of material. For what it's worth, it is my intention that this story will return to a certain kind of twisted sweetness.

He’s nauseous from the painkillers and the long car ride, mixed with the prickling ire he always feels when he enters Bedelia’s house, and no wonder; they both like to poke at their wounds.

It feels off, almost surreal, to enter through a sliding door at the back porch rather than Bedelia’s carefully ostentatious foyer. Hannibal holds the door for him.

There is an immediate, pervasive smell of roasting meat. Will pauses, involuntary. Hannibal watches him carefully. Will keeps walking. He had know what was going to happen, and made his choice. The actual experience of it is more disquieting than he thought it would be.

“Come,” says Hannibal, gesturing toward a staircase. Will goes, step after step, Hannibal’s gaze pressing against his back.

He draws next to Will at the top landing, and pulls open a door. The casual intimacy, the knowledge of it, sets off the petty hatred Will had been determined to ignore.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Hannibal radiates smugness as he opens the door of a heavy wardrobe with a flourish. “Perhaps you would care to freshen up. I took the liberty of obtaining some things for you,” and careful hands light on two overstuffed garment bags inside the wardrobe.

Will nods. He doesn't trust his voice. Hannibal smiles, too canny, just an edge of malice. It feels just like old times. Will’s guts are heavy. He should have known better than to think that yesterday’s changes would take root. They both know the steps to this dance.

Hannibal pauses, and Will realizes he has missed a cue. “Thank you,” he offers, and it’s too flat, too rough.

Hannibal is apparently satisfied. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some last-minute tasks to attend to. Perhaps you will join me when you are ready.”

Will stands in front of the wardrobe for a long time. It is an act of masochism. He wants to know what is happening downstairs. He wants to see it. Hannibal might be conversing with Bedelia. He might be inflicting some cruelty on her body, living or dead. Will doesn’t know which would bother him more, and that ought to disturb him. It does, but in a distant way. The past few days of wearing Hannibal like a cloak have affected him, or maybe this is what he has become. That doesn’t feel true, not entirely, but he’s here. Complicit. This is not part of another long con. Maybe it’s who he is, now.

Enough. He reaches forward and unzips the bags. He’s surprised at the contents of the first - plaid shirts and heavy sweaters, even jeans and waffle-weave. The second is more in line with expectations. Suits, yes, but subdued ones, subtle navies, dark greys. The loudest has a barely-there pinstripe. Button shirts, white and dark blue and ivory. There’s one in pink linen lurking apologetically at the back of the bag.

It feels like a test. He’s not sure what Hannibal wants from him. His gift is no help at all, not now. Hannibal is not sure what he wants from him. Will doesn’t know what he wants for himself, but that is nothing new.

That’s a lie. He wants to be elsewhere. He wants to be back at the safe house. That’s also a lie. He knew where Hannibal was taking him, and why. On some level he wanted - wants - to be here.

He snatches up a white shirt and a pair of suit pants. He’d like to tell himself it’s a desire not to fall back into his old life, or even that he’d like to please Hannibal, but it’s too dangerous to lie to himself in that way. He won’t be scruffy and underdressed at the table with the two of them. That’s the truth.

Still, he rolls up the sleeves of the button-down after he puts it on. It’s pure spite. It proves nothing. He does it anyway.

The lighting in the ensuite is unforgiving. Bedelia prefers to plan for the worst. Still, Will looks as good as could be expected. He’s well-rested, at least. He runs the taps and wets the heavy mother-of-pearl comb resting on the vanity and runs it through hair that’s gone flat in places from his time in the car. It’s not elegant, but it’s not careless. Good enough.

There is no sense standing here any longer. It is time to go downstairs.

He can’t hear voices, for what that’s worth. He makes his way to the kitchen. The first thing he sees is a jacket, carefully hung on the back of a kitchen chair. It’s garish, wide stripes and shiny material, large buttons. He draws a sharp breath, and Hannibal’s attention.

Will knows his face is giving too much away. Hannibal raises an eyebrow. “Do you object to my jacket, Will?” Smug, again, tinged with bitterness.

Will hates it, in truth, the garish stripes and the weight of a time that Hannibal had lived apart from him and with _her._ It’s petty now, but he’s allowed. “I prefer you in plaid,” and he’s in so deep, so deep that Hannibal’s cadence is sneaking in to his speech. In another life, he’d made a habit of blurting something harsh and pedestrian to reassert himself when this happened. Now, he just lets it lie in the space between them, soaks up the way Hannibal’s eyes scrunch with measured happiness. Of course he notices.

“Would you like us to match?” Hannibal enquires, mock-innocent, but his thin-lipped smile is as true as it is deliberate. Confinement has agreed with him. The restraint of his body has freed him in other ways.

Will chuckles, and that’s true, too. “God forbid.”

Hannibal hands pause, though he keeps the knife. Still, Will enjoys the sensation of Hannibal’s full focus. Unprecedented, in a kitchen. “It used to please me. It was a delicious irony; you, dressed as an archetype of the modern hunter and there I was.”

“And there you were.” Will swallows. “My stylized mirror.” Hannibal’s lips quirk at the impertinence, and Will can’t help but echo the smile. “You knew I was a hunter, even then.”

A short pause. Hannibal’s eyes are on his work, but Will can feel his focus like a physical weight. “Tell me, Will. Tonight, will you observe, or participate?”

He laughs, short, and longs for the mobility to push his hand into his hair without pain. “I’m already participating. You know that.”

Hannibal smiles down at paper-thin slices of carrot. “I am pleased that you know it as well.” _I’m glad that you admit it,_ Will hears.

“You don’t want to stop me?” and Hannibal’s tone is kind, conversational. “Is it truly too late?” This pause is cruel, or means to be. “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

“I don’t want to stop you,” and it feels like a surrender because it is. It’s been one long surrender since the fall. Since Jack’s visit, even, if he’s honest. Maybe he owes Bedelia that much. She had always been honest with him, after all. Cruelly so. “I don’t like her,” he says, and the flat admission unlooses a knot in his chest.

“I do,” and Will tries not to react to that. It’s ugly and there is no clearer sign that this feeling is groundless than the rich odor of roast lingering in the kitchen. But still, it sits jagged in his stomach, makes Will want to be a little cruel.

“It used to bother me,” Will says, another admission. Hannibal pauses in his work, all polite attention. Will finds he wants to hold his eyes. “The way you flaunted those others. When you went off with her.” There is nothing to read on Hannibal’s face, and that’s a kind of comfort. Will has surprised him. But he’s so tired of leaving things unsaid. It’s never lead to anything good. “You wanted me to know that I was just one of many.” That’s too cruel, though. His desire to twist the knife is gone, all of a sudden. “At least that’s what it felt like,” he adds, and his voice is too soft, too honest. An offering.

Hannibal swallows, glances down at his cutting board for a long moment. “Perhaps I gave you that impression deliberately,” he offers, though his voice is blank. “Perhaps I thought you would know better.”

Will absorbs that like a blow. “I know better now,” but that’s not enough. The moment is sharp, tense with a potential for violence that’s been absent for these past few fairy-tale days. “I meant it when I said that you were blurred, for me.” It’s hard, to put this into words. Stripping off a coat of his warpaint. “I… It was hard for me to tell where what I wanted ended and what you wanted began.”

He dares to glance at Hannibal and is surprised, gratified, to find that his stance is loose now. The storm’s passed. “And now?”

Maybe not. That was too careful. But this is an easy answer. “I know better now,” he repeats, but that’s not quite the whole truth. “Or maybe… Maybe it’s just that what you want and what I want are aren’t so different, anymore.” He swallows. “I’ll figure it out.”

Hannibal’s eyes are damp, his face immobile. Will is merciful, or wants to be. He recognizes Hannibal’s desire to be alone for a moment, to gather himself, and he’ll grant it. “I’ll go pour the wine.”

“Thank you,” Hannibal says and Will aches to touch him.

Instead, he passes through the door that leads to the dining room. Bedelia sits straight-backed, though her eyes are hazy and her face is white with terror. His eyes scrape down the long, low plunge of her neckline. “That’s a bold choice,” he says in lieu of hello.

“We must use the weapons we have available to us,” Bedelia says, in her measured way. His distant admiration at her composure tastes of Hannibal.

He pastes on a false smile. “Your best weapon would have been a plane ticket.”

“I was detained.” A pause. “And then I miscalculated. I had presumed he would make every effort to ensure your safe departure, yet here we are.”

The barb lands hard. It’s meant to. “He thinks of you as unfinished business,” he tries.

Bedelia doesn’t flinch. “Is that what you think this is?” She smiles, cold, inviting Will to take in the design of the table. The place settings are simple. Bedelia’s leg has pride of place, tied up with little flourishes that resemble a butterflies. Who is he, that he focuses on the implied insult, the use of _his_ metaphor, instead of the unmasked truth of the dish Hannibal has set before them?

Then his eyes catch on the small bunches of flowers carefully placed near where Bedelia has been seated. “Begonias and cyclamen,” he says. “Looks like the end of unfinished business to me.”

Bedelia’s gaze is pitiless. Will can’t blame her for that. “One popular definition of insanity is the decision to perform the same action again and again, but expecting the outcome to differ.”

Will stares at her, tries on a cold smirk. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” he says. “I want to play.”

“This form of payment is not in your nature.” He can’t look away. “What do you suppose will happen when he sees through this deception?”

He closes his eyes, just for a moment. He hates her, _hates_ her. She’s telling the truth as she sees it. “Would you like some wine, Bedelia?”

The jibe is beneath him, but he has lost the desire to needle her in this state. She doesn’t bother to respond. He takes the bottle at table’s edge and busies himself with the cork. He fills the glass at the head of the table, then the center. “I wouldn't do that, if I were you,” he says, before he approaches Bedelia’s seat. He nods at the oyster fork clutched in her hand. “Do you think it will do you any good?”

She has lost the element of surprise. She won’t strike him, now. It was never him she intended to strike. “I would prefer to maintain the illusion of possibility.”

Will can respect that. He pours her glass too generously, and turns away. He can hear her long swallow.

He is seized with the abrupt desire to leave the room, leave her presence. That thought has summoned Hannibal, though, hands full of three small plates.

“I have prepared a Roquefort salad, with caramelized pears and pecans, finished with a mustard dressing,” he announces. “I trust it will not overwhelm the entree.”

“Thank you for that courtesy,” Bedelia offers, and Hannibal inclines his head.

He bustles around setting plates and comes to rest at the head of the table. He picks up a large carving knife, mirror-bright, with great ceremony. “Quality ingredients demand simple preparations. Roast, lightly brined, injected with herbs d’provence.” Will feels compelled to watch as Hannibal carefully slices into the thigh, neat slices falling away from bone. He places portions on three small plates and distributes them. “Bon appetit.”

A charged pause. “I wonder if you know what you are trying to accomplish,” and Bedelia’s eyes are heavy on Hannibal. “At your parties in Baltimore, at our table in Florence, you took delight in the pretense. Look at this table, Hannibal. What do you see?”

Hannibal’s smile is thin, false. “I regret if the simplicity of the presentation disappoints you. I would have preferred to work without the constraints of necessity, of course.”

Bedelia’s gaze lands pointedly on the toes on the table. “This is an absence of artistry. The presentation is crude, for you. Do you know why?”

Will can’t help but admire her composure, especially as the near-palpable weight of Hannibal’s anger joins them at the table. “You believe that you do,” he says, dissecting the portion on his plate with neat, precise cuts. “Please, enlighten us.”

Bedelia’s mask does not crack. “You have set up a test, Hannibal. You are all but asking him to fail.” Hannibal’s knife stills. Bedelia flinches, just barely, but continues. “Are you so frightened of the possibility of happiness?”

Hannibal deliberately takes a bite, chews with evident enjoyment. The silence is deafening. At length, Hannibal swallows. “A false joy is no joy at all.”

“You have asked your archangel Michael to stop slaying dragons in order to wallow in the downfall of ordinary sinners. Tell me, where is the truth in that?”

It is so fast, so inevitable. Hannibal is up, across the table, hands surrounding Bedelia’s jaws, snapping her neck with one hard, controlled jerk.

Utter stillness. Will feels that he shouldn’t move, or breathe. “My apologies,” Hannibal says, and drops his shoulders, standing down. His voice cordial and his eyes flat. “That was impulsive, and I have interrupted our meal.”

Will wants to be shaken. He is instead relieved. “It’s what she wanted.”

Hannibal sighs. “Do you truly believe that she had earned a merciful death?”

Her presence in Will’s mind is unwelcome, all clear gaze and sharp edges. “That was her design.”

Hannibal’s lips are a thin line. “Would you like to hear mine?”

Will shakes his head. A painful smile. “I think you know I’ll see it, later.”

The air is heavy and Hannibal’s crackling, live-wire, pressing Will down and calling out to him in equal measure. Will pushes past it, around it. “Would you like to hear _my_ design?”

Hannibal’s smile lacks warmth. “Please.”

Will gazes down at the tablecloth. “We leave. We dispose of her in such a way that it’s hard for them to determine the time of death, when they eventually find her.” He raises his eyes to meet Hannibal’s. “They will lack evidence that we have survived. We leave. We get away from them. That’s my design.”

Hannibal cocks his head. “You would come away with me, even now?” His voice is hard to read.

There’s only one answer. Will has made his choice, come this far. It’s an inevitability. “Yes.”

“Why?” There’s movement, now, behind Hannibal’s eyes. Will finds he lacks the desire to interrogate it.

“I don’t know,” he says, and it’s true, for now.

Hannibal’s gaze is almost imploring, but Will has nothing more to offer just now. Eventually, Hannibal swallows, and turns his eyes to the table. “Perhaps it is just as well. The brine would have irritated your cheek.”

Will feels lost, the way he so often does around Hannibal. Brutality and tenderness, tangled together with such intensity. Will has never been good at resisting this lure.

The air is pregnant with conversations and confessions. Will is far too tired for either. “I’ll get the dishes,” he offers. Hannibal looks at Will for a long moment, and takes his fathomless eyes out of the room without a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow. So. I started out writing this chapter with the notion that Will's petty jealousy of Bedelia would be centered, and that Hannibal was needling Will a little because he is overwhelmed by and thus suspicious of the care and gentleness that Will has never really willingly directed his way before. And then this happened. My first draft was very unsatisfying to me. I tried again, and this particular kind of harshness felt much truer to me. I feel really bad, because I didn't warn readers at the outset that this kind of thing was coming. My only defense is that I didn't realize it would be coming, certainly not this hard. I've altered the tags to try to give fair warning to newcomers, but everyone has been so kind to me as I feel my way around in this new-to-me fandom. I really hope no one who's been reading along feels like I yanked the rug out from underneath them. :/


	5. Chapter 5

Will can barely breathe. Part of it’s the pain, near-blinding. It hadn’t done either of them any good to heft Bedelia’s heavy-limp body into the trunk of the Prius. He can see it too clearly, the way she slides in the close dark, the way the lawn-leaf bags Hannibal had placed around her tear on sharp metal edges and the stray Lego blocks that are a legacy of the car’s last owner. That’s part of it, too. But the worst is the weight of Hannibal’s displeasure, barely wrapped around the hot sharp edges of rage, the lead-heavy tinge that tastes of regret. Hannibal is at his worst when he is thwarted, even when it’s by his own hand.

Will wants to strike out at him. Will wants to stay silent. Will doesn’t know what he wants, what he hopes to accomplish, what it is that he’s become. In the end, he can’t bring himself to set match to tinder, not over Bedelia. There’s nothing to be done but bear the weight.

He does his best; minutes and miles slip by. Finally, he’s past endurance. He fumbles for the window button, allows allows the rush of wind to swirl around his face. It helps, a little.

Hannibal looks at him, narrow-eyed, and Will wordlessly rolls the window back up. It is not a surrender. He’s just changing the field of play. 

“I hated this part, with Randall Tier,” he offers, eyes on the road ahead of them. Hannibal’s interest cuts through the murk surrounding them both. “After, when I pulled off the suit - that wasn’t so bad. I was angry. I wanted to strip it from him. But afterwards..” Will swallows. “He seemed so small.” A snort. “At least until I had to pick him up and get him in the car.”

Hannibal is silent for a long moment. “I have never had the privilege of watching you clean and prepare your catch for table. Tell me, Will. Does it cause you disquiet?”

Hannibal means to needle him. Will won’t allow it, masters the reflexive anger the comparison draws out of him. “It does, a little,” he says, too honest. “Fish guts are no good. I can’t even feed them to the dogs. I hate the waste.”

“I prefer to convert waste into art,” Hannibal says, abrupt, almost nasty. He means to provoke.

Will is too tired to take the bait. “You do, don’t you,” he says, tired. “But you’re making Warhols. You still want the waste to show through.”

“I should be insulted by the comparison,” Hannibal says, surprisingly mildly.

“I thought you might be,” he admits.

Silence settles around them. Eventually, the air settles as well. “You are glorious in your wrath. I had thought, tonight, to show you the quieter pleasures to be had in its aftermath.”

That’s one thing you tell yourself you wanted, tonight, Will thinks but doesn’t say. Instead, he slips back into memories he had locked away for fear of how he felt, how he feels. Chiyoh’s prisoner, lifted up on wings he’d lacked in life. Randall Tier, as he’d always wanted, hungered to be; of the poor, friendless, faceless body that he’d lit ablaze so that she could not help but be seen for long, bright moments. “It’s not pleasure, not for me,” he says, and feels Hannibal tense. “It’s obligation.” A beat. “You engineer art. I make monuments.”

“He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending avenging angels among them,” Hannibal murmurs. A pause, sharp eyes on Will. “A pity that you did not trouble yourself to honor our poor, shy boy.”

“No,” Will says, and his voice sounds rough. “No, that was his monument. He wanted fire and blood.” The memory of it shocks through him, sharp and clear and beautiful. Beautiful, even now.

The feel of Hannibal’s gaze compels Will to turn his head. The rage is still there, but it’s banked, overlaid with something sharper and warmer. Will is pinned, thrilled, sick to his stomach.

Hannibal looks for a long time. Finally, finally, he turns back to his driving. The silence is still heavy, but now its tenor is strange. Best to let it press on his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for your kind comments and forbearance with my worries regarding the last chapter! I am really loving writing this fic. It's so far out of my comfort zone - I've never written in the perspective of a character who isn't a hero, or at the every least on some kind of redemption arc. This darkness is intrinsic to this fandom and everything I love so much about the show, but I'm finding it a little harrowing (in a good way!) and I really appreciate the helpful feedback. :D Hope you enjoy this installment, and I hope to be back with something a little longer this week. Cross your fingers for me.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will prepares Bedelia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter involves lengthy descriptions of interaction with and decoration of a corpse. The end result is actually way less gruesome than most every display in canon, but there's more attention to process. SPOILER: There is also minor self-harm by Hannibal. Painkiller use, too, I suppose.

He’s been slipping in and out of a doze for who knows how long. This time, it’s no longer possible to ignore Hannibal’s eyes on him. The weight of his gaze grounds Will in his body, which is no longer in motion. The car has stopped. He looks out the passenger side window - the cover of night, many trees. Out the windshield, there’s a small cabin and a smaller garage.

It is no longer possible to ignore Hannibal’s steady stare, so he meets it. “You are very certain of me,” Hannibal says, grave.

Will gently taps the side of his head with a closed fist. _I know you, don’t forget._ “You couldn’t bear to waste us both. Not all in one day.”

“You presume a great deal.” His heart’s not in it.

“You know that I don’t,” Will says, and Hannibal inclines his head, just slightly. Giving ground.

They extricate themselves from the car. Will is grateful for the cold, sharp air, the scent of trees. It’s cleansing, grounding.

Hannibal is standing in front of the trunk, weary but resigned. Will is tempted to tell him to leave it, to just leave the trunk open and let the cool night keep her, but the wrongness of that is so palpable he can’t form the words. “There are some things in the garage,” Hannibal says.

The truth of it settles on Will, faster than he would like it to. There’s no need for silence, for the mental device of his pendulums, not with Hannibal. Not anymore. “This is one of your kill houses.”

Hannibal doesn’t reply, only walks toward the garage. He stoops, and the door begins to rumble open, mechanical and automatic. It’s out of place; Hannibal usually prefers to be stubbornly old-fashioned.

Will does his best to ease in to the trunk at a good angle, the better to jimmy what’s left of Bedelia Du Marier toward the bumper. Hannibal joins him after a moment, careful not to jostle Will more than he must. It’s inelegant and very very painful, but they manage to wrest her from the trunk and down the driveway, into the garage, on to a plain steel table. It’s so obviously a kill house; the items in the garage are not Hannibal’s taste at all, chosen for blunt force, for ease of cleaning. He can feel the echoes of other crimes, other victims, pressing in on the edge of his consciousness. It’s all he can do to seal himself off from them.

Hannibal notices him noticing, and his curiosity is crushing, almost drowning out base notes of eagerness and something like fear. Will shakes his head, but doesn’t close his eyes, for fear of what he’ll see behind them.

“The meat is already ruined,” Hannibal says, matter-of-fact, and Will has a sudden, wild desire to hit him. He tamps that down, seals it away for later. So much he’ll have to reckon with later. “There are things that I can do to preserve her color for you, if you’d like.”

“Do them,” he says, tight, and the flash of Hannibal’s anger compels him to add, “please.”

That’s enough to placate. “You will need another painkiller, if you intend to work on her tonight,” Hannibal observes.

Will shakes his head. “I need my head clear.”

“A local anesthetic, then,” and Hannibal’s excitement, fascination bleeds through to his voice.

He leaves poor Bedelia, still shrouded in lawn and leaf bags, on the table and strides for the cabin door. Will is pulled along in his wake, edges of reality blurring into the too-familiar dream walking that overtakes him when he works, when he builds.

Hannibal has to bend to fish the keys out from under a barren flowerpot. That has to hurt. “I could have done that.” The words are out before he can stop to think about them, about what it means that even now he would like to spare Hannibal small pains. As though that were an entirely new desire.

“It would aggravate your stitches,” and Hannibal is pleased, though he’s trying to chide. Will says nothing.

Hannibal opens the door without further comment. The entryway is small and close. Hannibal shrugs off his coat and Will does the same, follows him through a second door into a small living room. There’s a real fireplace, two comfortable-looking couches arrayed around it. Will snickers at the sight of the bear rug on the floor between them, snarling head and all.

The curve of Hannibal’s mouth is sly. “When in Rome.” Will reflects his smile back at him with no feeling behind it.

Hannibal looks at him, sharp, but turns on the living room light and retreats up the stairs. Will settles himself down on one of the couches and unbuttons the top few buttons of his shirt, and shoves, baring his shoulder. Fresh blood stains the dressing.

Hannibal returns, crouches in front of him. The pull of the tape is unpleasant as the dressing is removed. Will fixes his eyes on the bear rug’s, does his best to ignore Hannibal’s touch. It’s clinical, almost impersonal, and a good thing, too. He couldn’t bear it any other way.

“You’ve pulled your stitches,” Hannibal murmurs. He doesn’t like to be ignored.

“Leave them,” Will says, eyes fixed on the bear. “I’ll just open them again, otherwise, and you know it.”

Hannibal’s fingers tighten enough to hurt, and Will looks back at him without meaning to. Something like regret has settled onto Hannibal’s face. It doesn’t sit easy. Will turns his eyes back to the rug.

There’s a sharp prick, and then another. It will take a while for the pain to fade.

Hannibal still has that pinched look as he rises, commands, “rest now.” He waits, but Will doesn’t answer. After a moment, he vanishes back out of the entryway.

Will lets himself sink into the couch, into parts of his mind he is usually careful to ignore. Bedelia, with her perfect grooming, her preference for chilly distance in all her interactions. Will had seen the reports from her time in Europe with Hannibal. Yes, he’d seen the reports, and a great deal more. Fear, yes, there was fear, but also a certain savage satisfaction, especially in the beginning. A staid delight in the power she had over such a deadly instrument as Hannibal, imperfect as it was.

Hannibal is back in the living room. When had he come in? “I have prepared the canvass,” he says, and Will nods. The anger he feels is as distant right now.

He drifts outside to the garage. Bedelia is flat on the table, stripped to her underwear. The ruins of her leg are placed are stitched back together, staples visible at the ankle. Hannibal has clearly tended to her hair, arrayed it as she often did in a screen-siren spill over one shoulder. Her eyes are open.

A blue suitcase he recognizes from the car is open next to her. Bedelia’s clothes, a large box of jewelry, a well-used makeup case. All things she would have needed, were she traveling with the two of them live and well. Hannibal has wanted that, on some level. On another, he wanted Will to think that he wanted that. On a third, he wanted mementos, and to prepare something like this. Plans on plans on plans and Will will spoil them all.

His vision wavers and he no longer sees Bedelia, small and sad and limp on the table. Instead, he sees the clean, formal lines of Egyptian art, the impassive face of the lion-headed goddess of destruction who sponsored the pharaohs off to slaughter. “I need a white sheet,” he says, somewhere distantly. He can’t remember time passing, but Hannibal is pressing it into his hands, fading out of the edges of his vision.

There’s a fly-tying kit, and a sewing kit, resting on the table’s edge. It will do. Will lets himself sink into the haze of creation. Small stitches, the type he has used on sails, to gather the top of the sheet into a graceful drape for her collar. He tucks the garment around her, unfinished edges hidden beneath her back. Necklaces, so many necklaces, some to be pried apart and others left intact to be woven into an intricate collar. Three thick golden necklaces spliced together to make a belt to pass around her waist. A piece of thick plastic sheeting, rescued from the interior of the garage, cut in the shape of the disk of the sun, wood glue from a toolkit to allow him to make a mosaic from her earrings, her bracelets, until the disk shines as it should, almost lurid beneath her ice-gold hair. Finally, he turns to the makeup bag. There are not tools he knows, but the kohl-black eyeliner is necessary, indispensable. He can recognize the pencil, at least. He practices against his wrist. The line is too-thick, unsteady. The pencil passes from him and returns, sharpened. It’s better. Will gently closes her eyelids, lines them carefully, thick. For beauty, for protection on the way to the underworld. She will need it.

One final touch. She is too pristine, too pure, for what she was in life. Nature, red of tooth and claw. There is blood on her hands, or there must be. Somewhere along the line, a scalpel has come onto the table, smudged with the leavings of eyeliner. He raises it to his wrist.

Fingers encircle his wrist, tug his hand away before he can make the cut. Will blinks, lets his eyes follow from fingers to wrist to shoulder to Hannibal, haloed by the sun. His face is strange - blurred, as though Will is looking at him through water. Will can’t see him clearly. How much time has passed? Has Hannibal been here the whole time?

Sounds penetrate his haze but he’s not back to himself, not quite. He has to strain to hear them. “Will,” and it’s Hannibal’s voice, repeating his name again and again.

“I need blood, to finish,” and that’s his voice, though he hears it from a curious distance. He tugs at his wrist, but Hannibal does not relinquish it until he has taken the scalpel. Eyes on Will, he makes one cut, quick and shallow, in his own wrist and holds it out of Will, an offering.

Will’s fingers encircle Hannibal’s wrist. He tugs, and Hannibal follows, just like that. His arm is limp, unresisting, and Will draws it close to Sekhmet’s hand, rubs her fingers in the blood, into the wound, rubs up and up until it is smeared on her palm. He tugs again, and Hannibal follows him to the other side of the table, allows Will to paint Sekhmet’s other palm. He lets go, steps back. There.

He comes back to himself who knows how quickly. It feels slow. He’s aware, now, that his face is damp. He’s been crying. Hannibal’s eyes are on him, weighty and compelling. Will stops short at what he sees. His face is open as it has even been; the horrors are there in his eyes, but so is something like awe, something sweet and overwhelming and there’s so much of it that Will closes his eyes to shut it out.

He turns instead to look at Bedelia, at what he’s done. He feels choked, and so, so tired. “Goodbye, Bedelia,” he forces out, and strides out of the garage, into the cabin. Hannibal doesn't follow, thank god. Will doesn’t know what he’d do if he did.

Now the grubby reality of life has reasserted itself. The sun is high - later than midday. No wonder he feels so bone-tired. His shoulder is screaming and his face aches. He forces himself up the stairs. A door is open, a pointed invitation. It’s a bathroom. Hannibal, courteous as always, has stacked a towel and a washcloth on the vanity, resting atop a pair of boxers and a plain white tee.

There is no shower, not even a showerhead, but the deep white tub is pretty nice. There’s hot water, anyway, and plenty of it. He turns off the taps, and hears noises in the hallway. Hannibal, asserting his presence. If he’s waiting to be asked for help, he can keep waiting. It’s slow and involves some jerking and splashing, but Will gets himself down. The hot water makes his bruises ache. Once he’s down, he’s got another problem. It’s not too hard to soap himself up with overly-herbaceous body wash one-handed, but it’s harder to rinse without dunking his bad shoulder. His hair feels unpleasant, damp from the steam and messy from sleeping on all sorts of surfaces, but he’s not up to the gymnastics it would take to wash and rinse it. He settles for halfheartedly running his good hand through it to wet it. Good enough.

He doesn’t linger, and he doesn’t trip on the way out of the tub, which is a near thing. When he reaches for the towel he notices another small mercy - a white pill, and a little cup of water to swallow it with. It’s not good practice to take medicine from Hannibal without knowing what it is, but he’s past the point of caring. He just wants to stop, to be somewhere else, to be someone else, in another body, in another life.

Then it’s time for the awkward procedure of inching his shorts up one-handed. He gives up on the shirt as a bad job.

He’s half-afraid Hannibal will be haunting the hallway, but he’s nowhere to be seen. He tries one of the doors in the upstairs hallway and it’s a lucky shot - a bed, neatly made. Shades over the windows, although nothing could keep him awake, not now, especially with the painkiller worming its way over his awareness.

He gets down, gets himself situated. Should’ve closed the door - Hannibal is hovering there. At least he’s quiet. Will ignores him, lets his eyes slip shut. Time to slip away for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! You folks are a very generous audience. Not only have I been blessed with some great conversations in the comments, I can't believe that this thing broke three figures in the kudos! Thanks so much. I hope that you continue to enjoy, and know I greatly appreciate your kind reception. :D


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Hannibal's general dubious sense of medical consent. Needles, blood, and deeply unhealthy manipulations but those are kind of par for the course, I suppose. :)

The first thing he feels is nausea, helped along by the stiff-sticky cotton coating in his mouth. The next is Hannibal, his presence warm and urgent and taking up all of the air in the room. His fingers are in Will’s hair, insistent and repetitive, but his body wants to stay asleep and is not going to give up without a fight.

No such luck. Hannibal won’t be ignored. Will never learned the trick of it, and he’s tried. He tries to take stock of himself, and immediately regrets it. A litany of sensations, none of them good. It’s only exhaustion and the last traces of his painkillers keeping them at bay. But Hannibal is still there, speaking now. Will gives in to the inevitable, slits his eyes open and grunts.

Hannibal is pleased; he has got his way. “I apologize for waking you. You may soon return to your rest, but I must insist that you take dinner, and allow me to tend to your shoulder.”

Will squinches his eyes shut presses a hand to his belly. The very thought of dinner turns his already precarious stomach.

Hannibal’s voice is close and even. “Without strength, you cannot heal. If that does not move you, perhaps you will consider the ill-effects that a steady stream of painkillers may work on a stomach that sits stubbornly empty for a day. More.” His nostrils flare, and his eyes slip shut, for just a second. When he opens them, they are dark, hungry. That hunger washes over Will, surrounds him. It is not located in his stomach. “Consider also that you are bleeding quite freely from the shoulder.”

Whose fault is that, Will wants to say. He wouldn’t like the answer. He wouldn’t like much of anything, except to rest, and it’s apparent that will not be allowed until he falls into line with Hannibal’s plans. At least these are less obviously harmful than most. Still, Will lets his eyes slip closed. Just a little longer.

Not long at all, in the end; Hannibal stops stroking and tugs at his hair gently. “I’m afraid I must insist.”

Hannibal’s urgency is an almost physical yank, and Will finds himself kicking off the covers, planting his feet on the floor. His stomach lurches. “Gotta brush my teeth,” he manages.

“I will tend to you in the bathroom.” Hannibal is pale and implacable and lit with something very like happiness even through his evident exhaustion. Will wants to snap at him. He wants to ignore him. He wants to bathe in his good-feeling and just go back to sleep. Instead, he toddles down the hallway to brush his teeth, Hannibal hovering at his elbow.

Hannibal bustles around in a cabinet while Will splashes his face with cold water, scrapes the worst of the grime out of his mouth with a toothbrush. The mint taste steadies his stomach a little, at least enough that the harsh light doesn’t make his head swim. He looks, unsurprisingly, like hell. The bandage on his shoulder is soaked through, sticky and tacky and wet. Not good.

Hannibal regards it with an unimpressed look, and rolls up his sleeves. Will turns to face him and Hannibal herds him up against the counter. “Be still,” he murmurs, and steps in close. He tugs the gauze pad up as gently as he can, but it’s stuck to Will, matted down with half-dried blood. It hurts something fierce. Will’s not proud of the little whimper that sneaks out of him. He doesn’t need to look at Hannibal to know that he’s pleased, and it’s not because he can help, not entirely. Will shuts his eyes and swallows.

Hannibal’s touch is light but god, it hurts, it still hurts. “This will require complicated attention.”

Will snorts, lets his eyes open. “I’m not sure that you have any other kind, Dr. Lecter.”

Hannibal’s gaze is soft. “Food first, I think,” he says, fond. It makes Will feel unsteady. He’s angry, he’s tired, he _is_. But he’s still here.

Hannibal notices the shift and his face closes off, just a little. His gaze drops to Will’s shoulder; he tapes a pad there, loose, just two pieces of tape for easy removal later. He snags a bathrobe from the back of the bathroom door and holds it out for Will to step into. When Will doesn’t move, he gives it a little shake. “You’ll be cold.”

“I’m just shocked you aren’t trying to make me dress for dinner,” and it’s a little mean, but he blunts it by turning, threading his good arm through one sleeve. Hannibal gently threads the wounded one through the other, and Will grits his teeth.

He allows himself to be turned around and Hannibal moves to tie it, hands working a wide belt into a complicated knot. “I can hardly insist on formality, given what I will serve,” he says, and takes Will’s elbow to steer him down the stairs. “I have prepared a bread pudding, enriched with heavy cream and egg yolks. Hearty, but easy to consume.”

“Dessert for dinner.” What is the world coming to?

Hannibal catches his eyes, half-smiling. “There will also be gelato. Burnt sugar, to provide contrast.”

There’s a pause, while Hannibal pulls out a chair for him at a little round table in plain view of the kitchen. It might seat three, but that’d be pushing it. He’d probably only ever eaten here alone, if at all.

Will does’t want to dwell on it, instead lets himself drift while Hannibal rattles around in the kitchen. It isn’t long before he’s presented with a plate, meticulous as always. His pudding is cut in a perfect circle. Hannibal’s even thought to remove the crispy top, and three thin curls of ice cream melt artfully into the hot mush, cut with drizzles of caramel sauce. The edges of the plate are decorated with little pieces of caramelized banana.

Will takes a swig of water to clear the worst of the toothpaste taste. It stays down. His stomach has settled, a little. It must be the smell. He’s suddenly very hungry, so tucks right in. The hot-cold of it makes his cheek sting a little, but it’s not intolerable. Easy to swallow. The liquor-burn-sweetness of the pudding reminds him a little of the ortolans, mixed with the ooze of his own blood. “It’s good,” he says, and Hannibal looks pleased.

“It is unconventional, I will grant,” and Hannibal just _looks_ at him. He can almost believe this is going to be easy. “But allowances must be made. It was chosen for your comfort, but also in celebration.”

Of course it’s not easy. When has it ever been. “Glad we’re still here?” he tries, and if it comes out bitterly, well.

“Despite your best efforts,” Hannibal says, and his eyes slide to Will’s forehead. “And mine. But no. Though I am very glad that we have not reached our ending, that is not what I thought to commemorate.”

Will swallows hard. He’d managed, somehow, not to think about it, to wrap himself up in the busywork of staying alive and the comfortable numbness of exhaustion. He doesn’t think about her, about what he’s done. He can’t. He can’t think about it and talk about it, examine every vile corner with Hannibal peering, avid, into each. It’s all he can do to gather up another bite of pudding. The flavor is distracting. He lets his eyes slip shut. Hannibal doesn’t remark, allows the silence, though the pressure of his attention is unwavering. “I can’t do this right now,” Will grits out, finally. At least he can meet Hannibal’s eyes.

Hannibal blinks at him. It’s a minor miracle; he doesn’t immediately press into thorny territory, seemingly content to watch Will consume his pudding. The world is hazy. It takes all of his concentration to keep his hand steady with his spoon. The comforting, rich taste of the meal helps him tether himself into his body, somewhat, but he still feels distant.

The scrape of the utensils on his plate is absurdly loud as he rounds up the last bite, dredging banana through the soupy remains of ice cream and caramel. Hannibal is pleased, though. “Would you care for some more?” he asks, almost indulgent.

He considers it, but his stomach is full and still a little rebellious. “It was delicious, but that’s not a good idea,” Will says. A beat. He hates it, but he’s grateful that Hannibal has seen fit to allow some peace between them. “Thank you.” One olive branch in exchange for another.

Hannibal takes it, smeary-soft as much as the expected smugness and Will’s not at all sure that’s due to his current haze. “It was my pleasure.” Will can’t muster up the energy to be angry. Hannibal seems to sense it, almost to relish it, but there’s a nervous edge in the air. “And now for the other item on our itinerary, before you can return to your rest.”

Will closes his eyes and lets his head tip back, just for a second. “All right.” He sighs. “Let me just get the dishes.”

“They are not a priority,” but Hannibal’s pleased he offered. He’s up and at Will’s side, helping him rise. Will would like to think he doesn’t need it but either he’s swaying or the world is. Hannibal’s grasp is firm, almost painful. So different from yesterday’s stillness and gentle touches.

The stairs seem impossibly long. Thankfully, Hannibal steers him to the living room instead. There’s a fire going, and the light’s nice but the flicker of it makes his stomach twist. He lets Hannibal help him down onto a plush couch before he lets his eyes fall shut. God, it would hurt to throw up with his face like this. He’s got to keep it together.

Hannibal’s close enough to throw off heat and he waits until Will feels steady before moving in. Hands undo the belt of the bathrobe and push it back from his bad shoulder. It hurts, but Hannibal doesn’t pull his arm all the way out so it’s manageable. The sharp sting of a needle. It’s unexpected, and he flinches. “Steady,” Hannibal murmurs, and he’s leaning in close. “This will take some time. You must rest now.” He cradles Will’s head against his chest, one hand carding into Will’s hair. Gentle, again, but greedy. This closeness is being taken, not offered. And around and around we go.

Whatever he’s been given works fast, or he’s just that tired. Probably both. Still, he’s awake enough to take careful aim. “You hurt me,” and his voice is soft, a little sad. “You’re never like this unless you have.” Hannibal tenses under him. Bullseye.

Darkness claims him before he hears any reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! This chapter gave me fits. The mood kept feeling all wrong; it took me a while to tease out where I think Hannibal's head's at, not to mention what Will is and is not allowing himself to think about just right at this moment. Finally I think I'm ready to pull the trigger! I'd love to hear what you think; talking it out in the comments does me a world of good. :D
> 
> In the meantime, I watched "The Wrath of the Lamb" about a million times. Here is my deep observation; Hannibal looks awfully fluffy and cute in his little mask in the FBI van, and shame on Alana for letting the back of his hair be cut so unevenly.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings (spoilery): Just nudity and nastiness, this time around.

For a moment there is nothing but blind panic and the need to fight his way free. He won’t be restrained, not again, not like this, straightjacket tight and pinning him prone, drugged and contained and under control. Never again.

“You will undo all of my good work,” and that’s Hannibal. He sounds all wrong, thick and slow and almost _rough_ and for a moment it’s _so much worse_ than believing he’d been incarcerated in Frederick’s charnel-house of an asylum yet again.

He takes a deep breath, takes stock of the situation. He’s not restrained, not really. Not with purpose, anyhow. His arm is bandaged, bound tight to his side, and he’s vacuum-packed to the couch with a tightly-tucked comforter. His thrashing had been useless, but he can free himself with a few tugs, and he does.

Hannibal is on the couch opposite, struggling his way upright. Even in the firelight, he looks grey. Exhaustion, maybe something worse. “You should be lying down,” he says, and Hannibal raises an eyebrow at the hypocrisy. Still, he settles as Will gets up and goes to him. “You look like hell.”

Hannibal narrows his eyes, but it’s mostly for show. “I will assume that is meant as an expression of sympathy.”

“Concern, at least,” and it feels like an admission but Hannibal stills, almost a flinch.

“Misplaced, I assure you. Though the wound had re-opened, I have…” 

If that’s meant to reassure, it misses the mark by a mile. “Re-opened? What do you mean, re-opened,” He flips up the blanket draped over Hannibal and his fingers curl in the sweater Hannibal’s wearing, tight enough to go white at the knuckles.

Hannibal half-sits, lays fingers against Will’s wrist. “Gently, if you must,” he murmurs.

Will just grips the sweater tighter. Anything he says now will be a mistake. Better to just breathe through it for a minute, just a minute.

Hannibal’s hand closes around his wrist, loose but present. Hell with it, he thinks, and lets loose a bitter chuckle. “Don’t you dare die from this.”

Fingers tighten around his wrist, brief. “I am not likely to.” A pause. “I am, however, in some pain.” Will is suddenly very conscious of his death-grip on the sweater, holding Hannibal in an awkward half-crunch.

He lets go, gives Hannibal a searching look. His eyes are too clear. “What are you taking for it?” He already knows the answer.

Hannibal doesn’t reply. It hits him, then, that Hannibal has placed himself between Will and the door. “So that’s how it is, huh?” he says, cold and quiet. Hannibal gives him a pinched look. “Do I need your permission to hit the head?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, and none comes after him as he stomps up the stairs. He takes a minute in the bathroom, leaning on the counter and staring at himself in the mirror. Nothing unfamiliar stares back, and maybe that’s the worst of all.

It’s spite, maybe. It’s panic. It’s the slow resurfacing of the guilt he’s carefully cordoned off these past few days. It’s a lot of things, really, that send him stomping down the stairs, almost on autopilot, blowing past Hannibal to the little vestibule-cum-mudroom. He shoves his feet into Hannibal’s too-big shoes - no time to waste getting his own on and laced - and throws a coat over his good arm, draped on the other shoulder. He hardly feels the cold as he stomps over to the garage, hits the button to open it up.

It’s empty. He knew it would be, more or less, but he had to see it. What a cliche he’s becoming- he feels empty, too.

For a wild moment he considers just walking off into the night, maybe to cool off, maybe for more than that. Maybe he’ll jump-start the Prius and… And what? Go where? And then, inevitably, another round of hide-and-seek, pain both physical from the separation, sharper each time. No. No, he’s done with that.

And then he’s drowning in an thick stew of worry and anger because there’s Hannibal, of course he’s come. Half-dressed and clutching an IV bag, no less. He’s not even wearing any shoes. He’s angry, yes, but mostly terrified and covering it badly with his practiced nothing-face. It’s what Will had wanted, more or less, but now that he’s got it he just feels tired. God help him, he feels guilty.

Hannibal turns that blank face on him. “Does her death upset you, truly?” Well, that was short-lived. Anger is easier than guilt, and so familiar, even if it’s just covering what’s underneath.

It’s easier to switch gears, back into the familiar push-pull. “What did you do with her?” he says, and his voice is even, thank god.

Hannibal steps in close. That taste of near-panic still hovers around him. His eyes are too bright. “Shall I tell you about our adventures together on the continent? How she killed with her own hands? How she killed with mine, and sought always only for more?”

“Don’t,” Will grinds out, and Hannibal straightens, hard triumph in his eyes. “That’s not why you killed her.”

“No,” Hannibal says, almost coaxing. There’s a plea in there, hidden.

“You don’t want to talk about why. You don’t want to think about it, either.” Will catches Hannibal’s eyes. “You expect me to enjoy it? You didn’t.”

“She has provided me with certain pleasures.” Hannibal, so malicious when cornered.

Will avoids the trap. “You wonder what they cost.” He’s gone still. It’s easy, too easy, to slip under that surface. He might drown, again. “You’re falling back on old patterns, old pleasures. You imagined them, inside. You imagined that they wouldn’t change. But _you_ have. They don’t fit perfectly anymore and it bothers you. You can’t stand a badly-tailored suit.”

Hannibal is frozen, maybe too angry to speak. Certainly too angry to let himself. He looks awful and worn and furious and Will is suddenly so tired of this, recriminations and circles over nothing. Hadn’t he decided, just a moment ago? Long before that, maybe. The moment he stepped into Hannibal’s space he decided, and this is where the chips have fallen. “Let’s go inside,” he says, deliberately offering instead of issuing a command. “We’ll catch our death out here.”

Hannibal doesn’t react to that and Will takes a gamble, steps up to his side and takes Hannibal’s elbow with his good hand. “Come on,” he says, carefully soft.

Hannibal regards him with sharp eyes. “I hardly know what to think,” he says, quiet. Dangerous.

“That makes two of us,” Will says. He tugs gently on Hannibal’s elbow and they fall into step, like always.

“I disposed of her,” Hannibal offers, too calm to be sincere as they pick their way back to the cabin door. “As much as it pained me to disturb your monument, it would have attracted animals.”

Will picked this fight, and now he finds he doesn’t want it. Hannibal doesn’t either, not really, but he can’t back down after the bomb Will lobbed, not so easy. “Will anyone find her?” he asks, neutral as he can.

Hannibal’s elbow shifts in his hand. He’s annoyed, almost, that Will won’t take the bait, but the adrenaline’s dropping fast and mostly he’s just in pain. Will feels guilty, again. Collateral damage, inflicted by accident. They both prefer their blows to be deliberate. “…difficult to determine the time of death.”

Hannibal probably knows that he wasn’t listening, not entirely, but that last bit is all Will needs to know. They slip back inside and Will kicks off his borrowed shoes. Hannibal’s feet are filthy. He shakes his head. “We are so stupid sometimes.”

Hannibal gives him a fathomless look, still roiling with disquiet. Will had rattled him, badly. Worse than he’d meant to, even. In the dim light of the hallway he looks old, and tired. 

He tries for light. “Did you really think I would run away in just my shorts and a pair of stolen shoes?” Like he hadn’t thought about doing just that, just for a moment.

He meant to reassure, but Hannibal shakes his head. It’s not a negation; there’s something almost hunted in his expression. “I have cause to doubt my predictions where you are concerned.”

That guilt, again, deeper because Hannibal keeps close, even now. Will recognizes the impulse, reaches out to put his good hand on Hannibal’s arm. “I didn’t run when you left me alone all day at the safe house,” he offers. Things have changed, he wants to say. Let them.

Hannibal’s mouth is tight. “There have been intervening events,” he says, and the ghost of old pain and expectation of more hovers heavy around that statement.

It’s deep, yawning, and Will can’t fight the pull. “I already tried to run from you,” he says, and he should stop, but he can’t. Doesn’t really want to. Needs to, maybe, but he’s never been good at self-defense. “I used to feel like a drinking glass. I spent so long filling myself up with you and I thought maybe that was why, that I could just fill myself up with someone else and be…” Normal, he wants to say. Maybe even good. It won’t come out. Hannibal’s eyes are fixed on his, hungry, hungry. He should stop but that pulls it right out of him, too much, too honest. “But that didn’t work.” A choked laugh. It’s not mirth. “So I thought I’d keep the good parts. I cooked. For my dogs, mostly, but still. I got new clothes. Just the good parts.” His face is doing things he doesn’t want it to. “Well. Look how that turned out.”

Hannibal is _riveted._ His throat works, but he’s silent for a long moment. “Will,” he says, finally, quiet and yearning. Will’s pulled him close before he knew he planned to do it.

Hannibal’s arms wind around him, soft, like he’s not sure that he’s allowed. Will tightens his hold, one-armed by necessity, and closes his eyes, feels Hannibal’s ragged breathing and the scratch of his stubble against Will’s cheek.

It’s so much, and then it’s too much. He rocks back and Hannibal’s hands slide away. It’s an effort, he knows. He touches Hannibal’s elbow. Not leaving, just moving. “Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says, almost a whisper.

Hannibal’s face is wet. He opens his eyes, searches Will’s face. He feels raw, scraped open. .

Still, he lets Hannibal look for a long time, until the frantic quality of his gaze softens. When he steps to the side and tugs on Hannibal’s elbow, Hannibal follows along. His steps are heavy, heavy as the air around him. He’s tracking dirt on the floor. Something else to worry about later.

They make it up the stairs, the walking wounded. Will runs a little water in the bathtub, warm but not hot. Hannibal is watching him like he might disappear and it makes him swallow, hard. “Still here,” he says, and he meant to joke but that’s not how it comes out.

He drops his eyes and crosses the small distance between them to help Hannibal with his pajama pants, stained now at the hems. Hannibal makes no move to help him, so Will steps in close and eases them over Hannibal’s hips. There’s nothing underneath. Will closes his eyes, deliberately doesn’t look. There’s enough vulnerability going around.

Hannibal’s eyes are dark, his attention sharp, but he steps out of the pool of his pants and follows when Will tugs him toward the bathtub. “Get in there and just stand, ok?” Everything is so goddamn loaded. “No need to re-open old wounds.”

“You have not foreclosed the possibility of inflicting new ones,” and that’s a doozy, but Hannibal leans his weight on Will’s good shoulder when Will places his hand there so he has leverage to step over the tub’s high side.

Will lets himself look at Hannibal’s face, hold his eyes. “I don’t think that’s what I want to do,” and the truth of it lets it hang heavy between them. He gathers up a washcloth and approaches the tub. Hannibal’s still silent, artificially blank.

He gets a little easier to read when Will drops down to his knees, the better to reach his feet one-handed. That’s… something. He can’t put off thinking about it, not forever. But they’re in no shape for it, not tonight. He can admit he’s been avoiding it, half-deliberately. Easier, because of the stress and the painkillers. They let him be a stranger in his own body. It’s so familiar it’s almost comforting.

He’s painfully present now, Hannibal is gazing down on him from above, the force of him surrounding Will on all sides. Will looks away, glad for the chance to be practical. He’s got to focus, make sure his hand is sure and that he doesn’t yank Hannibal’s leg out from underneath him. And yet it’s unbearably intimate, washcloth sliding over and between Hannibal’s toes, light to avoid aggravating scrapes and bruises. It should make it easier - he’s not a feet guy, but then again he’s not anything like _this,_ never before. “Hold on to something,” he says, and his voice is too low, too rough. “I’ve got to get the sole.”

Hannibal shifts. There’s an atmosphere of expectation, now, almost anticipation. There’s so much that Will is crushed by it. There’s a ringing in his ears. This is not what I had imagined, he hears, but Hannibal doesn’t say it. Doesn’t need to.

“There are times when a metaphor makes itself so obvious that it cannot be set aside,” and Hannibal’s voice is not calm waters, either. So they’re doing this, he thinks. So.

He turns his attention to Hannibal’s other foot. “Oh?” he says. Not an offer to continue, but not a denial, either. It seems silly to fight it, for all he’s too tired, too unsettled.

“The lamb of god washed the feet of the apostles before the last supper. I would not have expected to find myself in their place.”

That… was not what Will was expecting, and exactly what he should have. He isn’t quite relieved, but he’s not exactly sorry. Hannibal lifts his second foot, and Will makes shorter work of this cleaning. He could make a crack about Judas, but it doesn’t feel true. “We’ve had a lot of last suppers between us,” he says instead, and his knees pop as he rises, using the tub for leverage.

Will places Hannibal’s hand on his shoulder. Hannibal’s grip is careful, his weight palpable as he steps out of the tub. He’s looking at Will sidelong, a little hint of smirk. He’s longing to say _most recently, Bedelia’s,_ and Will is amazed that he’s restrained himself.

He thinks about drying, but the bathmat’s doing a good job and he can’t face the prospect of dropping back down to his knees, especially where there is no tub between them. Hannibal’s lingering eyes are enough. “Let’s get some rest,” he tries. It’s becoming a familiar refrain.

Hannibal looks at him, just looks. The air is thick. Will thinks about doing any number of things, and it freezes him up. Too long, maybe; Hannibal’s face shifts, just a little, little creases deepening. Pain, maybe. Disappointment. More hits he didn’t mean to deal.

This is it, he thinks, and reaches out to lay his good hand against Hannibal’s cheek. Hannibal goes still, but they’re both buzzing with it. “Is this what you imagined?” he murmurs.

Those yawning eyes, fixed on his. “No,” is all he says, but Will can feel the churning longing behind it. He curls his fingers around Hannibal’s jaw, and Hannibal moves into it, eyes falling shut.

He’s frozen, again, teetering on the precipice but he’s so tired and he hurts, near-whiplash and they’ve gone so far, so fast. Just days ago he’d said goodbye and meant forever and here he is, here they are. “I need to sit down,” he says, and it’s even mostly true.

Hannibal opens his furnace-warm eyes. He doesn’t move away but there’s an acceptance there now. Will lets his hand fall. It brushes along Hannibal’s arm and god, he’s naked. Will shivers with it.

Hannibal’s eyes are keen on him. He’s the one who has to shatter the moment, yet again. “Do you have more pajamas?” and he sounds strange, even to himself.

Hannibal’s mouth curls and Will closes his eyes for a moment. That dangerous overlap, that blur. Where does he end, where does Hannibal begin. He can’t fall into this, not without looking.

“In the bedroom,” Hannibal says, and there’s heat but it’s leashed. Will would think it merciful if Hannibal’s fear, his confusion, weren’t near-physical presences in the room alongside all of the other things.

This time, he tugs at Will’s elbow and draws him out into the hallway. Will thinks to give him a moment, give himself a moment. He turns toward the door he hasn't opened yet, the room at the other end of the hallway.

Something evasive travels across Hannibal’s face. “I think it would be best if you did not enter the spare room just now,” and isn’t that another lovely thing to worry about later. It doesn’t feel fresh, though, whatever Hannibal’s concealing. Kill house. He probably thinks Will doesn’t need the static. He’s probably right.

Will’s not so sure what he needs. To stand in the hall while Hannibal dresses? To follow him in and help and fall, most likely, into something that might rip them both to shreds? In the end he just after Hannibal but stops at the door, politely turns his back. Rattling, and rustling. No sounds to indicate pain, not even a too-sharp breath, but it’s Hannibal. He’s undoubtedly aggravating his gunshot wound and doesn’t that feel like a judgment, like fate, that every little boundary, no matter how temporary, costs pain and blood.

Hannibal comes up behind him, close enough to feel the warmth of him. “Why don’t you take the side by the door,” Will says. It is only a little bitter.

Hannibal’s breath is too quick, just one. He wasn’t expecting this. That makes two of them. Will brushes past him, begins the long process of getting down, under the covers. Hannibal sits on the edge of the bed, tense, until Will is situated. It can’t be comfortable.

Then he moves, efficient, deliberate. The bed is big enough that they don’t touch. Will thinks about closing the gap, maybe grasping his hand. That is a promise he is not sure he will keep. But Hannibal’s eyes are on him, his attention. It’s cruel to bring him so close but no closer.

He’s a coward, maybe, but he’s given so much ground. He lets inertia and exhaustion take the decision from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh. I am sorry this took so long. It's.... much longer than past chapters, and again things took a pivot I had thought would come later. I took a couple of days to let this rest and look at it again. I'd love to hear if you thought the back-and-forth was too abrupt.
> 
> Thanks so much for the kind feedback and interesting conversations many of you have been sending my way! I'm really enjoying wallowing around in this story.


	9. Chapter 9

He wakes and he hurts and he feels safe. There’s more than one contradiction in that, he knows, but the past weeks have been hard on him in small ways, never mind the obvious. It’s been a long time since he slept well without someone breathing in the room alongside him, Molly’s little snorts and sighs. Hannibal breathes like a metronome, steady as the tick of a clock. It’s almost enough to make Will think he’s faking it, but Hannibal would never deliberately allow himself to be seen with a thin line of drool sneaking out from behind the crooked teeth he takes pains to hide in other circumstances.

Will knows him too well to think he looks vulnerable, even like this. He does look exhausted, and no wonder. Hannibal with his schemes and his errands and his cooking - it was too easy to forget that he’s as torn open and beat to hell as Will himself, and far less rested.

Will can’t bring himself to disrupt this peace, and he will if he stirs. Hannibal is too keyed up to sleep through that, strain and painkillers be damned. It’s just as well. He’s warm and he wants to touch and he _can’t,_ not without knowing, not without counting the cost. All of the things he’s been carefully not thinking about are roiling just behind his eyes and it’s quiet enough, he feels just clear enough, to let them slip to the surface.

He lets his eyes close, but sleep is out of the question. Instead, he bathes in the iron certainty he’d had when he proposed this plan to Jack in the first place, the inevitability. No more dead families, no more Hannibal. No more Will Graham, slipping in and out of darkness and dragging everyone who touches him right down with him. No more anxious and nameless pull. He knew what he was doing. Hadn’t even said goodbye to Molly, not when she was hurt and begging for space in her understated way. He knew it would hurt her - Will, baiting one of the men who had tried to kill her and damn near succeeded with the other who’d orchestrated it all. It hadn’t seemed fair to take one more moment of her warm calm for himself and she’d know, she’d know. He’d told himself she’d be strong enough to take it.

That’s a decision he can’t take back. No going back now - he can taste her rage, her fear, the bone-deep protective panic she’s going to have to live with, now, and Wally, too. She’s too damn smart to take him back even if he could go, even if he could build a rebuild a self remotely like the one she’d known. Goodnight, sweet man. Can’t even say he died in the ocean. He died in a dark room at Quantico, a death pact made with a good man and woman driven gray-to-black by the man who sleeps beside him.

There are other decisions. He can go, or he can stay. He’s can’t afford illusions about what it would mean to go. His plan, his and Jack’s. Cars full of dead officers. Good men, most of them. Doing their best. Fighting for the families that would face the wrath of the Great Red Dragon unless someone strong did something. He doesn’t feel better that they’d known the risks, had volunteered. Doesn’t feel better that they were armed, went out fighting. Will had known, _known_ that some of them were likely to meet their deaths and the sheer numbers don’t change anything but the weight he carries.

But that’s not quite true. It changes Will’s prospects. He goes back, back to Jack and the FBI, all of it, and more likely than not that ends with Will behind bars. The Policemen’s Union, the families - they’ll need someone to blame, and Will is as deserving as he is convenient. The gray monotony of the BHCI, if he’s very lucky. More likely prison, and he’s been law enforcement long enough to know what that means. He’s strong, and there are killers inside him. Maybe he can hold on to himself and the only death will be his own. More likely he’s been remade in their image at long last, the beauty and the rage that will slip to the surface in the inevitable brawls and there will be blood on his hands, on his mouth. Years in solitary, probably, echoes in his head and he’ll be worse and there will be more blood, more and more. They won’t execute him quickly enough to stop the bleeding - too high profile to rush the process. And that’s discounting what Hannibal will do. He won’t be caught, not again. This rage, this abandonment - he’ll burn the world and that will be on Will, too, each brutal death and more than likely Hannibal’s own, somewhere down the line. The thought stops his breath in his throat. And doesn’t that say it all. A hundred deaths flicking behind his eyes and it’s _his_ that stops Will’s heart.

He’s not so far gone that he doesn’t feel sick about it. There’s no justification for this, no evil truly lesser. Maybe if he’d done it, if he could do it now, finish what he started. Too much morphine and they could slip away, together, hand in hand. Hannibal might even let him.

No. Nothing so easy, not like that. It would be brutal, clawing and biting and knives and teeth and tears and he’s not sure he has it in him, that he wouldn’t just… stop. Maybe Hannibal would finish it and maybe he wouldn’t and god, the mere thought of it leaves him rigid all over. His breaths come too fast and he can’t help it, looks over at Hannibal’s slack face and his stomach wrenches and visions of intestines spilling out slick and heavy, betrayal and hurt and light going out of those eyes and he can’t, he can’t fight him, he can’t. Maybe it’s the right thing, and maybe it isn’t but he can’t, not again.

A hand, soft over his own, startles his eyes open. Hannibal, looking with warmth and open concern, that overlay of deep, deep sadness that’s been a constant presence all these days. “You are troubled by your dreams,” he says, almost a question. His voice is rough with sleep.

Will’s mouth twists into a bitter shape. It hurts his cheek. “No, not my dreams.” Hannibal’s face tightens. The source of all of his dark thoughts is here and hurting. It coaxes something like the truth out of him. “I don’t know how to be here.”

Hannibal raises a hand, slow. It hovers near Will’s head for a moment, falls soft into Will’s hair when he makes no more to object. Hannibal strokes him, slow and gentle. His eyes are serious. “We will learn,” he says.

That should be frightening - Hannibal pushes, he experiments. He has never been content with Will as he is, only how he might be. Is it enough, now, this? Now that he’s done what he’s done? It must show on his face; Hannibal edges closer to him, hand still in Will’s hair. His motion makes the strokes move off-course, little hitches that Will presses into without thinking. Hannibal wants. Will wants, he’s pretty sure, all on his own account and not entirely the result of the heavy hot yearning Hannibal drips with always, and especially now. Perhaps Hannibal will push, now, in this way, confine himself to little destructions.

Will doesn't have the words to ask for it, the strength to follow through. Their bodies are too torn apart to safely come together - contrapasso. They both deserve to suffer and pay, to wait and fight and most likely spiral down biting and tearing as they always have before. “We have time,” he says, and he’s most likely lying.

Still, Hannibal’s eyes ignite and he’s closer still, until Will’s vision blurs and Hannibal’s nose is pressed against his own. Will lets his eyes fall shut and he feels hot breath and total stillness. His own breath catches, pitches around, but Hannibal doesn’t move, except for the steady sifting through Will’s hair. Will is frozen, heavy, until the anticipation around them is too much to leave him still. He fumbles a hand out, against Hannibal’s chest and them curved around his jaw, a thumb over the stuttering pulse-point at Hannibal’s throat. Even now, Hannibal doesn’t press forward, doesn't move at all except to nuzzle until his nose rests more comfortably alongside Will's. Will must take them over this cliff, too, if they are to tumble. He’s heavy, overextended. He doesn’t how to ask, what he’ll ask for. He doesn’t know how to be here. It’s heavy and frightening and far too much, now that he’s named this feeling and heard the truth of it from Bedelia, from Hannibal, even, in his roundabout way. It’s good and it’s soft and it’s false and threatening both and he’s pressed flat under the demanding weight of it and the bleak dark futures he has seen. Who knows how long they spend, prone and close, the only motion breath and blood and Hannibal’s slow, even strokes through his hair. Eventually, Hannibal murmurs, “we have time,” and it carries the weight of a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the end of the series, but I thought it was best to end this installment here so I can time-skip forward a little bit because both of them are too beat up to press forward with anything too strenuous. (It's quite hard to come up with proper author's note innuendo, but then I realized with these two you can't tell if I mean murder or sexytimes, and who among us can closely distinguish in this case? :P) I hope this isn't super-annoying for bookmarkers, but I'm afraid this writing style makes for awkward time-jumps if I don't make clean breaks! It will still be associated with the "Closer to God" series, if that helps.
> 
> Thank you all for your kind kudos and comments, and for your patience! Halloween is a crazy time of year for me and mine, and I always end up with a ton of houseguests and a hectic social calendar. I know this chapter took forever, and so did some of my replies, but it was always stewing in the back of my mind.
> 
> Also! I was a little worried that this was.... not abstract enough for Will having an introspective moment. I think Hannibal took his ability to wade into the quiet of the stream, and the memory palace that serves as a replacement is too full of Hannibal to stray into when considering him so closely. I'd love some feedback on whether you found that unconvincing or jarring. In the end, I felt ok, but I'm open to discussion and/or edits on this point especially.
> 
> Also-also! I feel like I should add a shout-out to genufa.tumblr.com, who doesn't know me from Adam but whose consistently interesting meta posts have a way of oozing into my characterizations in ways I can track and feel later.
> 
> Augh, I started a re-watch and WILL GRAHAM BREAKS MY LITTLE HEART. Sitting around at the end of Coquilles, waiting for Jack to talk to him despite his fraught relationship with Jack at the time. Will's such a caretaker, even when he can't take care of himself. In a weird way, Hannibal is lucky that he's all torn open physically and emotionally in Wrath of the Lamb... It's so much easier to get Will in close when you need help.

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! I like the first story of this series as a standalone, but I am driven to explore the new terrain Will and Hannibal must survey once the adrenaline wears off. I hope you enjoy this follow-up! I'd love to just natter on about the characters in the comments, so holler at me if you feel like chatting. :D


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